A caveat to my piece on my youngest son, Austen, whom I wrote about a-couple-of-weeks-ago: I asked my mother to start calling her grandson weekly and Austen brought Fast Eddie along for-a-surf last weekend. The results were: Austen is practicing with a premier soccer club; he seriously wants the surf-ride van from me; he had his best surf ever yesterday; and, he seems focused on school! Wow!! Fast Eddie is a nice kid – but I think Austen realized that he’s alotta talk and needs to get a life. I think that bringing some of the family weight to bear and keeping-the-road-clear helps.
So these latest developments have me feeling pretty good about life – but not-so-good that I want to stay in the crazy rat race that has been created for every level of the middle class and the working class.
Anyone keeping track of dates will notice that the content I will allude to in this piece took place during the week of August 8th – but now that I’m back-in-the-saddle-again, I tend to be a week behind.
Elements in the U.S. power structure and media continue to use the stock market as some type of barometer for our national health. If the stock market closes high – everything is good with the U.S. If it closes low, well – then I guess the façade is more difficult to maintain. And every day we are thrown a different crumb to chew on – while the game of smoke and mirrors gets played out for another day’s run: one day the unemployment picture is better – the next day it isn’t; one day the manufacturing index is up – the next day it isn’t; and, one day the rest of the world blames us for their economic woes – the next day we blame someone else for ours.
As Fish sang:
Something’s got to give under this pressure;
The cracks are already beginning to show
I just don’t know how much longer we should be asked to worry about a new NFL football stadium in Los Angeles with 300,000 children starving to death in Somalia. I don’t know how much longer I can stomach tea party nonsense – when yet another black man has been beaten to death in the American South. And, I’m still not quite sure how Texas intends to balance its budget by cutting 49,000 teaching jobs and making massive cuts in health care while 18 returned veterans commit suicide per day.
As T.S. Eliot wrote:
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand
It’s so hard to get an objective perspective on the big picture when you are trying to stay ahead in the rat race – trying to make sure that you don’t get trampled by those who race alongside you. It makes us all quite mindless, and, I see it again while I’m driving: people are so pre-occupied with their problems that they are driving very dangerously again. But like Daniel Quinn said – we all want to be fed.
Is that why we were born into this space and time? To be shot up by some crazed Norwegian? To starve to death in Somalia? To get hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq or Afghanistan? To riot in England and Ireland? To be lynched in the American South? To retire at 55 in Greece but 67 in Germany? To be seduced into playing the Fat Cats’ game on Wall Street? To think that our vote means anything? To have hoped that British West Protectorate born Obama could rescue this country from its downward spiral? Get me out of this rat race…
And the falcon cannot hear the falconer…